Kevin Harvey, the county’s First Assistant Register, said that it’s not just a matter of unpaid fees at stake.

There are 148,000 mortgages on record at the Southern Essex County Registry of Deeds with cloudy ownwership, Harvey said — in large prt because of the way MERS documented, or failed to document, the transfers.

“We have a forensic mortgage auditor looking at their records,” Harvey said. “Once we have that, we may find that their records aren’t accurate.

“There may be fraudulent assignments, and a significant amount of assignments that are not filed,” Harvey added. “They’d file the original transfer, but after that, they never recorded the assignments because they didn’t want anybody to know what they were doing behind the scenes.”